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Sandwich (Chop hard-boiled eggs fine) (II)
Chop hard-boiled eggs fine, season with salt and pepper; moisten with mayonnaise dressing. Spread on buttered whole wheat bread. Garnish with a pickle.
A plain egg salad sandwich from a book that assumes the cook already knows how to boil an egg and make mayonnaise. The only real variables are moisture and seasoning.
- YieldTwo hard-boiled eggs, chopped, will fill about two sandwiches. The original gives no quantity, leaving the cook to scale it.
- Chop, do not mash"Fine" here means fine dice, not paste. A pastry blender or two table knives worked across the eggs in a bowl gives the texture the recipe wants; a food processor turns it to slurry.
- Moisten, and no moreThe hinge of the recipe is the word moisten. Add mayonnaise a teaspoon at a time until the egg just holds together — too much and it soaks the bread within minutes.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn 1909 this would generally have meant a homemade emulsion of egg yolk, oil, and vinegar or lemon, seasoned to taste; recipes of the period vary in sharpness and in whether mustard appears at all. Commercial mayonnaise works; a squeeze of lemon and a pinch of dry mustard shifts it in that direction.
- Whole wheat breadLikely a softer, plainer loaf than today's dense seeded breads; graham and whole wheat loaves were both current at the time and not identical. A plain wholemeal sandwich loaf is the nearest match. Butter generously to the edge — that layer helps keep the filling from wetting the crumb.
- The pickleA garnish, not an ingredient: the recipe sets it beside the sandwich rather than in it. The type is unspecified; a small cucumber pickle or gherkin suits.
- KeepingEgg and mayonnaise filling should be refrigerated and eaten the same day; make the filling ahead if you like, but assemble close to serving.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book appeared in 1909, at a time of considerable American enthusiasm for the sandwich as light, respectable food — the sort of thing served at bridge parties, ladies' luncheons and church suppers. Its several hundred entries are mostly one-sentence variations on a handful of bases, with a run of egg sandwiches among them. The whole wheat bread is a period marker: graham and whole wheat loaves carried an aura of healthfulness in the era of Kellogg and the sanitarium diet. Mayonnaise was, for many households, still something made at home in a bowl; commercially bottled versions were only beginning to reach American grocers in the years around the book's publication.